93 research outputs found

    Neural adaptations to electrical stimulation strength training

    Get PDF
    This review provides evidence for the hypothesis that electrostimulation strength training (EST) increases the force of a maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) through neural adaptations in healthy skeletal muscle. Although electrical stimulation and voluntary effort activate muscle differently, there is substantial evidence to suggest that EST modifies the excitability of specific neural paths and such adaptations contribute to the increases in MVC force. Similar to strength training with voluntary contractions, EST increases MVC force after only a few sessions with some changes in muscle biochemistry but without overt muscle hypertrophy. There is some mixed evidence for spinal neural adaptations in the form of an increase in the amplitude of the interpolated twitch and in the amplitude of the volitional wave, with less evidence for changes in spinal excitability. Cross-sectional and exercise studies also suggest that the barrage of sensory and nociceptive inputs acts at the cortical level and can modify the motor cortical output and interhemispheric paths. The data suggest that neural adaptations mediate initial increases in MVC force after short-term EST

    Benchmarking health system performance across regions in Uganda: a systematic analysis of levels and trends in key maternal and child health interventions, 1990–2011

    Get PDF

    Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

    Get PDF
    Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

    Prognostic model to predict postoperative acute kidney injury in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery based on a national prospective observational cohort study.

    Get PDF
    Background: Acute illness, existing co-morbidities and surgical stress response can all contribute to postoperative acute kidney injury (AKI) in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery. The aim of this study was prospectively to develop a pragmatic prognostic model to stratify patients according to risk of developing AKI after major gastrointestinal surgery. Methods: This prospective multicentre cohort study included consecutive adults undergoing elective or emergency gastrointestinal resection, liver resection or stoma reversal in 2-week blocks over a continuous 3-month period. The primary outcome was the rate of AKI within 7 days of surgery. Bootstrap stability was used to select clinically plausible risk factors into the model. Internal model validation was carried out by bootstrap validation. Results: A total of 4544 patients were included across 173 centres in the UK and Ireland. The overall rate of AKI was 14·2 per cent (646 of 4544) and the 30-day mortality rate was 1·8 per cent (84 of 4544). Stage 1 AKI was significantly associated with 30-day mortality (unadjusted odds ratio 7·61, 95 per cent c.i. 4·49 to 12·90; P < 0·001), with increasing odds of death with each AKI stage. Six variables were selected for inclusion in the prognostic model: age, sex, ASA grade, preoperative estimated glomerular filtration rate, planned open surgery and preoperative use of either an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker. Internal validation demonstrated good model discrimination (c-statistic 0·65). Discussion: Following major gastrointestinal surgery, AKI occurred in one in seven patients. This preoperative prognostic model identified patients at high risk of postoperative AKI. Validation in an independent data set is required to ensure generalizability

    A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

    Get PDF
    Meeting abstrac

    Changes in the composition of the RNA virome mark evolutionary transitions in green plants

    Get PDF
    Background: The known plant viruses mostly infect angiosperm hosts and have RNA or small DNA genomes. The only other lineage of green plants with a relatively well-studied virome, unicellular chlorophyte algae, is mostly infected by viruses with large DNA genomes. Thus RNA viruses and small DNA viruses seem to completely displace large DNA virus genomes in late branching angiosperms. To understand better the expansion of RNA viruses in the taxonomic span between algae and angiosperms, we analyzed the transcriptomes of 66 non-angiosperm plants characterized by the 1000 Plants Genomes Project. Results: We found homologs of virus RNA-dependent RNA polymerases in 28 non-angiosperm plant species, including algae, mosses, liverworts (Marchantiophyta), hornworts (Anthocerotophyta), lycophytes, a horsetail Equisetum, and gymnosperms. Polymerase genes in algae were most closely related to homologs from double-stranded RNA viruses leading latent or persistent lifestyles. Land plants, in addition, contained polymerases close to the homologs from single-stranded RNA viruses of angiosperms, capable of productive infection and systemic spread. For several polymerases, a cognate capsid protein was found in the same library. Another virus hallmark gene family, encoding the 30 K movement proteins, was found in lycophytes and monilophytes but not in mosses or algae. Conclusions: The broadened repertoire of RNA viruses suggests that colonization of land and growth in anatomical complexity in land plants coincided with the acquisition of novel sets of viruses with different strategies of infection and reproduction.We thank the colleagues at the 1000 Plant Genomes Project for helping us to access the transcriptomes used in this study via the iPlant Collaborative. We are grateful to Javier Forment (IBMCP-CSIC), Vincent Lefort (PhyML), and the E-Biothon team (E-Biothon platform is supported by CNRS, IBM, INRIA, l'Institut Francais de Bioinformatique and SysFera) for expert help with high-performance computing; to Yuri Wolf, Jan Kreuze, Eddie Holmes, and Mang Shi for sharing sequence data and alignments; to Sejo Sabanadzovic, Jan Kreuze, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful virtual discussions and critical remarks; and to Natalia Mushegian for technical assistance. SFF was supported by grants BFU2015-65037P from Spain Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and PROMETEOII/2014/021 from Generalitat Valenciana. ARM is a Program Director at the US National Science Foundation (NSF); his work on this project was supported by the NSF Independent Research and Development Program, but the statements and opinions expressed herein are made in the personal capacity and do not constitute the endorsement by NSF or the government of the United States.Mushegian, A.; Shipunov, A.; Elena Fito, SF. (2016). Changes in the composition of the RNA virome mark evolutionary transitions in green plants. BMC Biology. 14(68):1-14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-016-0288-8S1141468Roossinck MJ. Plant virus metagenomics: biodiversity and ecology. Annu Rev Genet. 2012;46:357–67.Koonin EV, Dolja VV, Krupovic M. Origins and evolution of viruses of eukaryotes: The ultimate modularity. Virology. 2015;479-480:2–25.Yamada T, Onimatsu H, Van Etten JL. Chlorella viruses. Adv Virus Res. 2006;66:293–336.Van Etten JL, Dunigan DD. Chloroviruses: not your everyday plant virus. Trends Plant Sci. 2012;17:1–8.Zhang T, Jiang Y, Dong W. A novel monopartite dsRNA virus isolated from the phytopathogenic fungus Ustilaginoidea virens and ancestrally related to a mitochondria-associated dsRNA in the green alga Bryopsis. Virology. 2014;462:227–35.Wilson WH, Van Etten JL, Allen MJ. The Phycodnaviridae: the story of how tiny giants rule the world. Curr Top Microbiol Immunol. 2009;328:1–42.Iyer LM, Balaji S, Koonin EV, Aravind L. Evolutionary genomics of nucleo-cytoplasmic large DNA viruses. Virus Res. 2006;117:156–84.Colson P, De Lamballerie X, Yutin N, Asgari S, Bigot Y, Bideshi DK, et al. “Megavirales”, a proposed new order for eukaryotic nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses. Arch Virol. 2013;158:2517–21.Gibbs AJ, Torronen M, Mackenzie AM, Wood 2nd JT, Amstrong JS, Kondo H, et al. The enigmatic genome of Chara australis virus. J Gen Virol. 2011;92:2679–90.Valverde RA, Sabanadzovic S. A novel plant virus with unique properties infecting Japanese holly fern. J Gen Virol. 2009;90:42–9.Han SS, Karasev AV, Ieki H, Iwanami T. Nucleotide sequence and taxonomy of Cycas necrotic stunt virus. Brief report. Arch Virol. 2002;147:2207–14.Lockhart B, Fetzer JL, Olszewski NE. Preliminary characterization of Cycad leaf necrosis virus, the first badnavirus identified in cycads. Phytopathology. 2006;96:S70.Mushegian AR, Elena SF. Evolution of plant virus movement proteins from the 30 K superfamily and of their homologs integrated in plant genomes. Virology. 2015;476:304–15.Maumus F, Epert A, NoguĂ© F, Blanc G. Plant genomes enclose footprints of past infections by giant virus relatives. Nat Commun. 2014;5:4268.Wickett NJ, Mirarab S, Nguyen N, Warnow T, Carpenter E, Matasci N, et al. Phylotranscriptomic analysis of the origin and early diversification of land plants. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2014;111:E4859–68.Merchant N, Lyons E, Goff S, Vaughn M, Ware D, Micklos D, et al. The iPlant collaborative: cyberinfrastructure for enabling data to discovery for the life sciences. PLoS Biol. 2016;14:e1002342.Becker B, Marin B. Streptophyte algae and the origin of embryophytes. Ann Bot. 2009;103:999–1004.Koonin EV, Dolja VV. A virocentric perspective on the evolution of life. Curr Op Virol. 2013;3:546–57.Matasci N, Huang LH, Yan Z, Carpenter EJ, Wickett NJ, Mirarab S, et al. Data access for the 1000 plants (1KP) project. Gigascience. 2014;3:17.Makarova KS, Aravind L, Grishin NV, Rogozin IB, Koonin EV. A DNA repair system specific for thermophilic Archaea and bacteria predicted by genomic context analysis. Nucleic Acids Res. 2002;30:482–96.Majumdar I, Kinch LN, Grishin NV. A database of domain definitions for proteins with complex interdomain geometry. PLoS ONE. 2009;4:e5084.ČernĂœ J, ČernĂĄ BolfĂ­kovĂĄ B, Zanotto PMA, Grubhoffer L, RĆŻĆŸek D. A deep phylogeny of viral and cellular right-hand polymerases. Infec Genet Evol. 2015;36:275–86.Iyer LM, Koonin EV, Aravind L. Evolutionary connection between the catalytic subunits of DNA-dependent RNA polymerases and eukaryotic RNA-dependent RNA polymerases and the origin of RNA polymerases. BMC Struct Biol. 2003;3:1.Altschul SF, Madden TL, SchĂ€ffer AA, Zhang J, Zhang Z, Miller W, et al. Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs. Nucleic Acids Res. 1997;25:3389–402.Koga R, Horiuchi H, Fukuhara T. Double-stranded RNA replicons associated with chloroplasts of a green alga, Bryopsis cinicola. Plant Mol Biol. 2003;51:991–9.Jablonski SA, Morrow CD. Mutation of the aspartic acid residues of the GDD sequence motif of poliovirus RNA-dependent RNA polymerase results in enzymes with altered metal ion requirements for activity. J Virol. 1995;69:1532–9.Morin B, Whelan SPJ. La protĂ©ine L des Mononegavirales. Virologie. 2012;16:258–68.Liang B, Li Z, Jenni S, Rahmeh AA, Morin BM, Grant T, et al. Structure of the L protein of Vesicular stomatitis virus from electron cryomicroscopy. Cell. 2015;162:314–27.Chabannes M, Iskra-Caruana ML. Endogenous pararetroviruses – a reservoir of virus infection in plants. Curr Opin Virol. 2013;3:615–20.Bousios A, Darzentas N. Sirevirus LTR retrotransposons: phylogenetic misconceptions in the plant world. Mob DNA. 2013;4:9.Bertsch C, Beuve M, Dolja VV, Wirth M, Pelsy F, Herrbach E, et al. Retention of the virus-derived sequences in the nuclear genome of grapevine as a potential pathway to virus resistance. Biol Direct. 2009;4:21.Roossinck MJ. Lifestyle of plant viruses. Philos Trans R Soc B. 2010;365:1899–905.Nibert ML, Ghabrial SA, Maiss E, Lesker T, Vainio EJ, Jiang D, et al. Taxonomic reorganization of family Partitiviridae and other recent progress in partitivirus research. Virus Res. 2014;188:128–41.Koonin EV, Wolf YI, Nagasaki K, Dolja VV. The Big Bang of picorna-like virus evolution antedates the radiation of eukaryotic supergroups. Nat Rev Microbiol. 2008;6:925–39.Poch O, Sauvaget I, Delarue M, Tordo N. Identification of four conserved motifs among the RNA-dependent polymerase encoding elements. EMBO J. 1989;8:3867–74.Guindon S, Dufayard JF, Lefort V, Anisimova M, Hordijk W, Gascuel O. New algorithms and methods to estimate maximum-likelihood phylogenies: assessing the performance of PhyML 3.0. Syst Biol. 2010;59:307–21.Letunic I, Bork P. Interactive tree of life (iTOL) v3: an online tool for the display and annotation of phylogenetic and other trees. Nucleic Acids Res. 2016;44(W1):W242.Li CX, Shi M, Tian JH, Lin XD, Kang YJ, Chen LJ, et al. Unprecedented genomic diversity of RNA viruses in arthropods reveals the ancestry of negative-sense RNA viruses. eLife. 2015;29:4.Yutin N, Wolf YI, Raoult D, Koonin EV. Eukaryotic large nucleo-cytoplasmic DNA viruses: clusters of orthologous genes and reconstruction of viral genome evolution. Virol J. 2009;6:223.Liu H, Fu Y, Xie J, Cheng J, Ghabrial SA, Li G, et al. Evolutionary genomics of mycovirus-related dsRNA viruses reveals cross-family horizontal gene transfer and evolution of diverse viral lineages. BMC Evol Biol. 2012;12:91.Atsatt PR, Whiteside MD. Novel symbiotic protoplasts formed by endophytic fungi explain their hidden existence, lifestyle switching, and diversity within the plant kingdom. PLoS ONE. 2014;9:e95266.Hom EF, Murray AW. Plant-fungal ecology. Niche engineering demonstrates a latent capacity for fungal-algal mutualism. Science. 2014;345:94–8.MagallĂłn S, Hilu KW, Quandt D. Land plant evolutionary timeline: gene effects are secondary to fossil constraints in relaxed clock estimation of age and substitution rates. Am J Bot. 2013;100:556–73.Johnson MT, Carpenter EJ, Tian Z, Bruskiewich R, Burris JN, Carrigan CT, et al. Evaluating methods for isolating total RNA and predicting the success of sequencing phylogenetically diverse plant transcriptomes. PLoS One. 2012;7:e50226.Kreuze J. siRNA deep sequencing and assembly: piecing together viral infections. In: Gullino ML, Bonants PJM, editors. Detection and diagnostics of plant pathogens. Dordrecht: Springer; 2014. p. 21–38.ChĂĄvez Montes RA, de FĂĄtima R-CF, De Paoli E, Accerbi M, Rymarquis LA, Mahalingam G, et al. Sample sequencing of vascular plants demonstrates widespread conservation and divergence of microRNAs. Nat Commun. 2014;5:3722.Marchler-Bauer A, Derbyshire MK, Gonzales NR, Lu S, Chitsaz F, Geer LY, et al. CDD: NCBI’s conserved domain database. Nucl Acids Res. 2015;43:D222–6.Edgar RC. MUSCLE: a multiple sequence alignment method with reduced time and space complexity. BMC Bioinformatics. 2004;5:113.Söding J, Biegert A, Lupas AN. The HHpred interactive server for protein homology detection and structure prediction. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015;33:W244–8.Le SQ, Gascuel O. An improved general amino acid replacement matrix. Mol Biol Evol. 2008;25(7):1307–20.DaydĂ© M, Depardon B, Franc A, Gibrat JF, Guillier R, Karami Y, Sutter F, Taddese B, Chabbert M, ThĂ©rond S. E-Biothon: an experimental platform for bioinformatics. 2015 Computer Science and Information Technologies (CSIT) 2015;1-4.Okuno K, Hama T, Takeshita M, Furuya N, Takanami Y. New potyvirus isolated from Cryptotaenia japonica. J Gen Plant Pathol. 2003;69:138–42

    Tracing data journeys through medical case reports: Conceptualizing case reports not as 'anecdotes' but productive epistemic constructs, or why zebras can be useful

    Get PDF
    Medical case reports provide an important example of data journeying: they are used to collect data and make them available for re-use to others in the field including clinicians, biomedical researchers, and health policymakers. In this paper, I explore how data journey in case reports, with particular focus on the earliest stages of the process, namely from creation and publication of case reports to the initial re-uses of them and data within them. I investigate key themes relating to case reporting and re-use, including factors which seem to smooth the path along which the data captured by a case report journey via broader citation patterns and detailed qualitative analysis of highly re-used case reports. This analysis reveals some of the key factors associated with the case reports whose data have greater amounts of journeying including publication in a general medical journal; that the data have broader implications and evidential value for topical or even urgent issues for instance in public health; and use in the case report of multiple research methods or concepts from diverse subfields. These findings along with standardization of case reporting are shown to have epistemological implications, particularly for how we understand the journeying of data.Rachel A. Anken

    Genetic, Phenotypic, and Interferon Biomarker Status in ADAR1-Related Neurological Disease

    Get PDF
    We investigated the genetic, phenotypic, and interferon status of 46 patients from 37 families with neurological disease due to mutations in ADAR1. The clinicoradiological phenotype encompassed a spectrum of Aicardi–Goutiùres syndrome, isolated bilateral striatal necrosis, spastic paraparesis with normal neuroimaging, a progressive spastic dystonic motor disorder, and adult-onset psychological difficulties with intracranial calcification. Homozygous missense mutations were recorded in five families. We observed a p.Pro193Ala variant in the heterozygous state in 22 of 23 families with compound heterozygous mutations. We also ascertained 11 cases from nine families with a p.Gly1007Arg dominant-negative mutation, which occurred de novo in four patients, and was inherited in three families in association with marked phenotypic variability. In 50 of 52 samples from 34 patients, we identified a marked upregulation of type I interferon-stimulated gene transcripts in peripheral blood, with a median interferon score of 16.99 (interquartile range [IQR]: 10.64–25.71) compared with controls (median: 0.93, IQR: 0.57–1.30). Thus, mutations in ADAR1 are associated with a variety of clinically distinct neurological phenotypes presenting from early infancy to adulthood, inherited either as an autosomal recessive or dominant trait. Testing for an interferon signature in blood represents a useful biomarker in this context
    • 

    corecore